Seven kinds of source go in, and the work is published six ways, with 5 essays beside them. In between, each claim is recorded with its source and its tier.
None of them is treated as the original. Each enters under its own name, with its own limits on what it may claim.
The SBL Greek New Testament, a modern critical edition of the Greek. The reading starts here, and its claims are keyed to Greek words.
The Syriac Gospels, consulted throughout. It is a witness to the Aramaic, not the original, and on its own it cannot settle a reading. Where the Galilean lexicons attest the same word, the Peshitta’s part is the shape of the sentence: the order of the words and their tenses. Where only the Peshitta has the word, it is shown as a Syriac witness and labelled so.
An earlier Syriac translation than the Peshitta, in two manuscripts, the Sinaiticus and the Curetonian, from the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon’s transcription (by permission of Stephen A. Kaufman). The band covers 3,532 verses, with a line for each manuscript whose text survives there (the Sinaiticus 3,342, the Curetonian 1,861), at the verse where CAL places it. The comparison with the Peshitta records agreements and differences: where a manuscript has the Peshitta’s word it enters the consensus as an independent second Syriac witness.
When Yeshua quotes the Torah or the prophets, the words underneath are Hebrew. The 88 Old Testament quotations render from the Hebrew source, with any divergence from the Greek noted, not corrected.
Sokoloff’s Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (5,980 entries), joined to the corpus in two ways that are kept apart: by exact headword, where the dictionary has the same word, and by root family, where only the root is shared. Only an exact join receives the DJPA badge. By occurrence, 58.2% of the glossary’s words join an exact DJPA headword; ambiguous matches were checked by two AI reviewers and settled by hand. The lexicon labels and corroborates a word. Where a Galilean form is shown with its vowels, the vowels are anchored to a printed vocalization (Sokoloff’s entries or Dalman’s 1905 Grammatik, indexed from the print), and the display says whether they are printed or reconstructed by regular morphology.
The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon, queried for the 1,845 distinct Aramaic words in the four Gospels, particles included. CAL files an entry for 1,791 of them. Where we can tell which of CAL’s same-spelled words is ours (1,132 of the 1,344 glossary words), the card carries the vocalized form, the part of speech, the root, and the numbered senses with the dialects that attest each one; where no CAL entry can be matched with confidence, the card says nothing. Attested in a dialect means the word is recorded in that dialect’s surviving texts, not that Yeshua spoke it. A confident match to a word common to the whole Aramaic family counts as Galilean and Western attestation, since the family includes Galilean, unless Western Aramaic is shown to prefer another word for the same sense. No pronunciation is claimed. With explicit dialect tags, Common Aramaic matches, and supporting Western citations, 764 of the 1,132 resolved words have Western attestation, 475 of them Galilean. CPA counts as Western evidence: CAL’s Christian Palestinian texts are largely a translation of the Gospels, so a CPA hit shows that translators who spoke Western Aramaic used the word; the Galilean tags still show separately. Used by permission of CAL’s maintainer and credited wherever it shows.
Published Aramaic reconstructions (Casey, Dalman, Burney, and Torrey among them). Each is weighed on its evidence, and a minority position is weighed as a minority position. Kutscher’s Galilean studies and the Fitzmyer–Harrington texts serve as dialect checks. No single scholar is treated as the authority.
The core vocabulary, settled and written down so that later verses follow it: 47 fixed words, and a small set of further renderings tuned by hand. Malkuta is built on the verb to reign and names a reigning in progress, not a territory, so it renders reign. Tub is the ordinary verb to turn, or turn back, which is what the prophets ask for; repent is a later Latin overlay carrying penance the Aramaic does not say.
Williams (2004) documents 21 habits of Syriac translators; they limit what a Syriac-only reading may claim. A Louw–Nida semantic-domain code sits on the Greek of 1,335 glossary words and shows in the interlinear word card, a label for the renderings that read straight from the Greek.
The Lewis–Gibson 1899 Christian Palestinian Aramaic lectionary, the closest surviving relative of Galilean, has been partly transcribed in two independent passes (208 of 318 pages read as of 5 September 2026, 117 of them clean enough to use). Its lines are placed by verse using the Greek and Peshitta word order, and shown under 658 verses, labelled by confidence, after the early Christian Palestinian manuscripts the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon transcribes (961 verses, by permission of Stephen A. Kaufman); together they reach 1,493 verses. Christian Palestinian Aramaic counts as Western evidence; Galilean attestation is shown separately.
Two further Palestinian lexical anchors sit beside the Galilean lexicon: Schulthess’s Lexicon Syropalaestinum (1903; 3,604 Christian Palestinian Aramaic entries, indexed from the print) and Dalman’s 1905 grammar. Both are used for reference on forms and vowels; neither affects a tier. A second CPA Gospel witness, Lewis’s 1909 Codex Climaci Rescriptus, has been transcribed the same way (22 of its 24 Gospel pages as of 2 September 2026); with CAL’s transcription of the same manuscript, the CPA band carries a Codex Climaci line under 228 Gospel verses. Phillips’s 2025 edition of CCR II and XI (Acts and epistles, not Gospels) is in hand but not yet transcribed.
The sources named here are cited, with their editions, on the sources page.
The question: what Aramaic most likely stood beneath this Greek word, and how surely do we know it? The evidence is recorded in one form throughout, so that anyone can check the answer.
The four Gospels (89 chapters, 3,779 verses). A word’s record holds about 64 facts: the Greek, the Syriac, the Palestinian Aramaic where attested, the gloss, the tier, where each claim came from, and whether the word sits in speech or in the narrative frame.
A glossary entry exists only where an Aramaic root can be established, and it holds only the occurrences that share that root.
The felt-sense entries were drafted in parallel batches and merged into one glossary. Where an entry has been reviewed by hand, the reviewed wording replaces the draft, and flagged senses go to the two-reviewer check.
A small set of renderings is fine-tuned by hand for spoken fluidity and clarity of sense. Each is recorded with its reason and kept when the text is rebuilt.
Flagged glossary senses are cross-examined by two independent AI reviewers. A fix lands only where both agree; where they disagree, a person decides.
Claims carry their source. Exact DJPA matches and accepted CAL Galilean or Common Aramaic matches share one badge for Galilean/Western attestation. Otherwise the card names a Peshitta or Syriac witness.
Where a witness is silent, the cell shows a · gap rather than a guess.
The evidence places a word on a four-rung ladder, and the rung decides which language governs the English. For spoken words the rung follows the evidence: where it is strong the Aramaic leads, and where it is thin the Greek holds.
The fourth rung is about where a word sits, not how much evidence it has. Words inside reported speech do not fall to the fourth rung for lack of evidence; when the Aramaic beneath a spoken word cannot be pinned, it is T3. 12,520 words stand on the fourth rung, 10,425 of them with a Peshitta word shown beside them.
Rounds of read-aloud revision, the decisions logged with their reasons and with what they superseded.
552 of those decisions are encoded as machine-checked rules that run whenever the text is rebuilt, so a rendering that breaks a settled decision is caught before it is published.
Chapters are checked against canonical versification for missing, repeated, or out-of-order verses, and the critical text’s known omissions are flagged. The Word editions are checked too; the audio edition carries no verse numbers or headings.
The narrative frame is told in the past tense. Before a chapter is published, its narration is checked for present-tense verbs such as “he says” or “they come,” and the build stops if it finds one.
Quotations of six words or more in the essays and on these pages are compared with the current text of the verse they cite, so a quotation that drifts from the rendering is caught before it is published.
The reading text and its apparatus are built from the same data, cross-linked in both directions, and published together.
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John: read, and press play to listen along.
Talk-along rows under the verses: Aramaic first, the source layers as toggles, word-level tiers. A living draft.
What each word means, beside the Qala’s rendering and the standard one, grouped by Aramaic root. Occurrences link back to their verses.
The words of the four Gospels drawn as a network. Words are linked when they often share verses, and many are grouped by the kind of act or thing they name.
Type English, Aramaic in Latin letters, Syriac, Hebrew letters, or Greek. Results open the glossary, the lesson, or the verse in the interlinear.
The reader and audio editions of each Gospel as .docx, free to download.
Why Aramaic at all · the four words beneath “save” · the Hebrew inside the quotations · how much Galilean is really here · whether he contradicts himself.
The links are checked each time the site is built: glossary occurrences link to their verses, and interlinear words to their glossary cards.
✦ A way to hear the Gospels with Galilean ears
✦ A rendering built from the Greek text of the written Gospels, listening for the Aramaic beneath it
✦ Graded on a four-tier ladder, one tier per word
✦ Revised as the work continues
· The entire Bible: this is the four Gospels alone
· A claim to possess all of Yeshua’s exact words
· A claim that the Greek Gospels are wrong
· A secret original Gospel
· The Peshitta dressed up as the original
· Root-mysticism; nothing renders without a lexical anchor
· Finished. These are drafts